One Hundred Letters from Hugh Trevor-Roper, review

The correspondence of a master historian shows us the man in full, says John
Gallagher

At the age of 73, Hugh Trevor-Roper went to Australia. He had been Regius Professor of History at Oxford, master of a Cambridge college, a wide-ranging and stylish historian and internationally embarrassed after his mistaken authentication of the forged “Hitler diaries”. But in a private letter, he boasted that the “great triumph” of his visit was not the honour he was shown, or the lectures he gave, but his encounter “at last, face to face, in the flesh, with a creature of which I have been enamoured – a romantic, remote, platonic and, I had supposed, hopeless passion” since childhood: the duck-billed platypus.

Richard Davenport-Hines and Adam Sisman (Trevor-Roper’s biographer) have assembled 100 letters that show this brilliant, difficult man in a new light. He was no cloistered scholar: we glimpse him as an intelligence officer during the war, a reporter at Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem, a tourist in search of ancient Greek antiquities and an honoured guest in Zulfikar Bhutto’s Pakistan.

The upshot of his wide experience was an abiding belief in the absurdity of narrow specialism. For Trevor-Roper, to be an “amateur” was a title of honour. In 1981, discussing the state of MI6 with the military historian Michael Howard, he summed up his grievance by complaining that “we are back in the days of the hopeless old professionals”.

He was a passionate defender of the importance of style in the writing of history. “[If] one is excited by a subject, or a discovery,” he wrote, “one should be able to communicate the excitement.” There can be few simpler pieces of advice to the aspiring academic than this: “Life is short, and those who will not take the trouble to write clearly cannot properly expect to be read.”

And he’s funny, gleefully funny. The high and mighty are skewered in a sentence: Enoch Powellis a man “whom I know and, to a certain extent, respect, respect but cannot like – who can? He is not human”, while Margaret Thatcher is disposed of with the observation that “her Toryism seems to be rather that of Charles I than of Edmund Burke”. Even small children are fair game: “They all look alike – ie like prawns, only noisier – and can be very tiresome in the house.”

Trevor-Roper wrote of his “terrible, almost physical difficulty in expressing emotion”, but found greater ease of expression on the page. In a letter to Xandra Howard-Johnston (who would become his wife) he wrote: “I give my heart to you – rather a complicated object, you may say, like a sea-urchin, prickly outside and untempting within; but you asked for it and must connive at some of its limitations.”

To his stepson, James, he wrote gently of their shared difficulty in social situations, offering wisdom a world away from his barbed bons mots: “What everyone in the world really wants, whether they are fully aware of it or not, is to be loved, and a character capable of inspiring or giving affection is never despised.”

Some will be disappointed that we see too little of Trevor-Roper the historian. He is there in his letters to Blair Worden, Frances Yates and Wallace Notestein, but his historical writing appears more often as a sideshow than as his life’s work.

It seems a shame too, though perhaps an unavoidable one, that Sisman and Davenport-Hines had to restrict themselves to 100 letters: I would love to have read those to Orwell or Cyril Connolly, or the letter in which Trevor-Roper claimed to have offered an olive branch to his implacable enemy, Evelyn Waugh.

More than once, Trevor-Roper mentions his unease at the idea that his letters might find a wider audience. He was chary of having his correspondence published, asking Sisman: “Who of us would wish to be judged by our private letters, in which one is licensed to be frivolous and irresponsible?”

But being frivolous and irresponsible is part of being human, and one of the things he got wrong was the idea that “if you mix trivial and serious things, you merely trivialise the serious”. The many Trevor-Ropers of this collection – one “anointing” his wife’s bedbug sores in a Russian hotel room, another writing a poised letter to Kim Philby five years after his defection and, finally, one widowed and almost blind but still firing off warm, wry notes – together make a complex but fascinating creature whom, like the platypus, it is a pleasure to meet at last.